On the take and loving it

From WikiLeaks

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life...

„

— G. H Hardy, A mathematician's apology (1941)

Academic recipients of the U.S. intelligence budget.

By

Julian Assange (ja@iq.org - Advisory Board)

Date

October 7, 2007

Over the last decade, U.S intelligence funding of academic
research has taken on cavalier, even brazen qualities. This article reveals
over 3,000 National Security Agency and over 100 Defense Intelligence Agency funded papers and draws attention
to recent unreported revelations of CIA funding for torture research.

Covert CIA-funded torture research

The June 2007 edition of Anthropology
Today contains a paper Buying a piece of anthropology, Part 1: Human Ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA by David H. Price, an Associate Professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin's University.
The article details how during the 1960s the CIA used the Human
Ecology Fund to push a covert research agenda into torture and
interrogation techniques.

Alan Howard and Robert Scott, two recipients of covert CIA grants
who developed a theoretical model for "stress in humans", were given
an opportunity to respond:

As David Price points out in his article, we were deeply
dismayed to learn that the Human Ecology Fund, which provided
a summer stipend to write our article on stress, was a front
for the CIA, and that the paper might have been used to
generate torture procedures. We are firmly opposed to any
actions that are degrading to human dignity under any
circumstances, including warfare. All of our contributions
to the health and welfare literature have been written with
the goal of alleviating human suffering, not using it to
gain hegemonic advantage.

While the exposure of the Human Ecology Fund is important
in light of the active use of torture by the Bush administration, it leaves the impression
that such funding is cold war history. However, as we shall see, current intelligence funding
of the academy is pervasive.

The National Security Agency

World telecommunications traffic flows. Many countries communicate phone calls and internet traffic with each other by passing traffic through the United States where the traffic is intercepted in bulk by the National Security Agency

In 1999 I reviewed all National Security Agency patents
in order to understand a mystery. Here was the premier spy agency,
with bases all over the world and a budget larger than that of the
FBI and CIA combined yet it was the subject of a solitary — and vaguely hagiographic — work from 1982, James Bamford's "The
Puzzle Palace".

For several years the consensus among NSA watchers such as the
Guardian's Duncan Campbell (the C in the ABC trial) was that the
NSA had failed in its quest for "the grail" despite over two decades
of research. What was this "grail"?

Consider the following joke, popular in U.S university mathematics
departments where for several years the NSA had hired half of all
new maths Phds:

The NSA offers exciting and interesting work for recent college
graduates in mathematics and computer science. Pick up the phone,
call your mom, and ask for an application.

The NSA, not known for its sense of humor, was pained that this
joke was not a universal reality. While its bases, spy satellites,
undersea cable taps and secret deals with telcos could mass-intercept
the world's voice calls, the NSA would need millions of employees
to listen for "NSA", "application" and whatever else the agency or
its political masters were interested in. What the NSA needed was
a way to automate both listening and interception.

Removing the human element would permit the NSA to leap from millions
of daily voice intercepts, with a few thousand human transcriptions,
to millions of daily voice intercepts with millions of transcriptions,
archived and "googleable" for eternity. Historically the two primary
checks on NSA powers have not been Congressional oversight nor even
the economic costs of bulk interception, but of costs of bulk
transcription and translation. By 1999 translation had been partially
automated (enough for search) and transcription remained as the
final barrier to the agency's goal of being the universal spy with
an ear in every international (and now every domestic) phone call.

I followed a trail from two of the patents to other sources and
front companies such as the "Maryland Speech Research Agency"
and showed in the London Independent that the NSA had found
its grail.

But this isn't a story about universal hegemonic spying. It
is a story about "academic" research.

NSA funding of academic research

During my investigation I discovered that many of the NSA's research funding
covers were essentially transparent. U.S intelligence agencies, in
finding the ideological playing field to themselves, have little need of complex funding concealment. Efforts to hide the
true source of intelligence derived academic funding are now minimal.
Research funding cover names, at least for the NSA, are not directed at counter-intelligence,
they are shields against cursory third-party social opprobium and
apparently largely voluntary. I will mention a specific example.

Grant code 'MDA904' - National Security Agency

The NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of millions into the academy
through research grants using one particular grant code. NSA funding
sources are often nakedly, even proudly, declared in research
papers ("I may be nothing, but look, a big gang threw me a sovereign").
Some researchers try to conceal or otherwise downplay the source
using accepted covers, weasel words and acronyms, yet commonality
in the NSA grant code prefix makes all these attempts transparent.
The primary NSA grant-code prefix is MDA904.

Googling for this grant code yields 49,900 references (Oct, 2007)
although some refer to non-academic contracts (scholar.google.com
3,100). From this one can see the board sweep of
academic research interests being driven by the NSA.

An examination of academic papers referencing the code gives
the impression that most or all research grantees know the true
source of their funding. These are not academics who have been
fooled. These are willing, even eager, participants.

Various levels of funding concealment can be seen when we subtract out
the naked NSA references (from Google search results) and look
at what remains.

Googling for 'MDA-904 -"National Security Agency"' reveals the first
level of cursory concealment from social sanction -- just use the
acronym. This ploy is not so effective anymore, but it must be
remembered that it is only in the last few years that the acronym
has come into common political or social parlance. Insiders used
to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency".

'MDA-904 -NSA -"National Security Agency"', shows that many are fond
of using the light cover Maryland Procurement Office or the
umbrella cover "Department of Defence" or "DoD"

Mass surveillance research is not academic

One may look at an intelligence funded paper such as Geometric Hyperplanes of Lie Incidence Geometries, ostensibly a matter of pure mathematics and ask what the connection is with surveillance powers. It may be hard for us to see the connection, but we know that the paper's funders think there is one. The NSA and other intelligences agencies do not fund research capriciously. There is no NSA funding for HIV education or tastier ice cream cones. Intelligence agencies fund research that they think will give them an edge or establish a closer relationship with the researchers concerned, gradually co-opting them into financial dependency.

In the example of Geometric Hyperplanes of Lie Incidence Geometries, this work is likely related to dimensionality reduction. Massive interception databases of who talked to who and when and about what have high dimensionality. Dimensionality reduction is needed to simplify the complexity until intelligence officers can understand the social relationships they are interested in. Additionally, privacy protecting algorithms used on the internet and elsewhere are designed to be of high dimensionality — and so hard to crack.

In the same way that CIA sponsored research into stress models were used by the CIA to design torture and interrogation techniques, NSA sponsored research into branches of what seem to be pure mathematics are used for global surveillance of communications — the end result of which is to further general U.S. war and intelligence objectives, including handing people over to the CIA for interrogation or torture.

We should not let our lack of imagination about the abstract or arcane deceive us. When a tobacco company funds research into cancer, we may not understand the details, but we know the tocacco company saw something in it for them.

Here is a brief guide to understanding the connection between the major activities of the NSA and research into what appear to be obscure branches of engineering or mathematics.

Additional documents

Conclusion

Far from the "deep dismay" expressed by some academics on being
informed about covert CIA grants in the 1960s, modern
academic recipients of the intelligence budget are "on the
take and loving it".

Educated, intelligent people have many opportunities in life. Those who out-source their minds to secretive and abusive organizations demonstrate to us either a lack of intellectual ability or an impoverished moral standard. They do not earn my respect as scholars or as human beings.